Salomon: angling to become first trans Miss Venezuela

Esteban ROJAS
Fri, May 26, 2023 

Model Sofia Salomon aspires to be the first transgender woman to compete in the Miss Venezuela beauty pageant

Sofia Salomon is the picture of concentration as she poses in bathing suits and evening wear for a photo shoot in preparation for what could be an historic campaign.

The 25-year-old model is hoping to become the first-ever transgender woman to vie for the Miss Venezuela crown.

"All eyes are on Miss Venezuela," she told AFP. "Me being there would be making history."

Venezuela is one of the top producers of "Miss" pageant winners: It holds seven Miss Universe titles and six for Miss World.

Beauty competitions are a way of life in the crisis-stricken South American country, with a guaranteed TV viewership of millions for the national pageant.

"Like football is very important in other countries, here it is very important to be a beauty queen," Salomon said between poses.

"When a girl is growing up, if she is tall, skinny, everyone tells her that she should go to Miss Venezuela. So it is something we grow up with, it is a culture, it is a feeling."

Online entries for this year's Miss Venezuela pageant close next Wednesday, after which a panel will interview a shortlist and select 24 finalists.

Organizers did not respond to AFP's queries about whether or not there would be any limitations on Salomon's participation in a deeply conservative and often homophobic society.

- Support and love -

Salomon's campaign has drawn much attention on social media -- both messages of support and homophobic abuse.

But she takes it all in stride.

"Ever since I can remember, I have always had the support of my dad, my mom and all my family," she told AFP.

"I had an excellent childhood full of respect, of love, and so everything becomes easier because you can show society who you really are."

Salomon took part last year in the Miss International Queen pageant in Thailand, the biggest for trans women, and made it into the top six.

"There were many messages on social networks" from people who wanted me to "participate in another contest," she recounted.

"Now that Miss Universe and Miss World accept transgender girls, this opportunity has opened for me to participate in Miss Venezuela."

Angela Ponce broke barriers when in 2018, as Miss Spain, she became the first transgender contestant in Miss Universe.

- 'Hell for many' -

For Salomon, it is not only about personal glory, but also giving "visibility" to people like her in a conservative society.

She models in Spain and Mexico and has her own clothing brand. But not everyone is so lucky.

"Being trans in Venezuela is hell for many people," said Richelle Briceno, a trans woman and activist.

"It is to be excluded and it is to be excluded from equal opportunities."

Salomon's high profile holds a positive message for Venezuelan society, added Briceno, that "trans people survive here and we impose ourselves in the good sense of the word."

Argentina led the pack in Latin America by recognizing official gender changes in 2012, followed by Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru among others.

Venezuela has no legislation in this area, allowing people only to change their names and even this is difficult, according to LGBTQ activists.

Salomon has both Venezuelan and Colombian nationalities.

In Colombia, unlike her country of birth, she is recognized as a woman.

Venezuela also does not allo same-sex couples to marry or adopt children.

"Whatever happens, I will remain a successful woman," Salomon told AFP.

erc/mlr/tjj

PAKISTAN

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Westernised transgenders or colonised transphobes? Examining the FSC verdict on the Transgender Rights Act

Many of the concerns or panics expressed by petitioners and opponents of the Act echo right-wing Western anti-trans narratives.

Nayyab Ali 

DAWN

Published May 26, 2023 

Hailed as one of the most progressive pieces of legislation internationally, the passage of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 marked a major milestone for the advancement of transgender rights in Pakistan.

Summarily, the Act prohibits discrimination against a transgender person in areas such as education, employment, and healthcare. It directs the central and provincial governments to provide welfare schemes in these areas such as reforming health curricula to address basic health issues of the transgender and intersex community, besides other measures that ensure the full inclusion and participation of transgender persons in mainstream society via rehabilitation, vocational training, and employment schemes.

Under the Act, offences such as compelling or enticing a transgender person to beg or enter forced or bonded labour, denying a transgender person the right of passage to a public place, forcing or causing a transgender person to leave their household or village, harming or endangering the life, safety, health, or mental and physical well-being, and physically, sexually, verbally or economically abusing a transgender person are punishable offences.

Many stakeholders, ranging from community activists to human rights experts, lawyers and medical professionals, joined hands to develop this legislation. It is based on the most recent research while also being culturally specific to the khwaja sira communities that have existed for centuries in Muslim South Asian society.

In contemporary Pakistan, the transgender community has been marginalised because transgender people don’t ‘fit into’ existing gender categories. Consequently, they face problems ranging from social exclusion and discrimination to lack of education, unemployment, and adequate medical facilities.

The 2018 Act recognised this status and gave it legislative backing to begin solving issues affecting the transgender community, ensuring access to healthcare, education and self-determination and recognising their right to human dignity.

A (100) step(s) backwards

The harassment, violence and discrimination faced by the transgender community in Pakistan has been co-opted by conservative groups in a bid to ostracise and demonise a community with a rich history and cultural identity in the country.

The hard-fought gains for legal gender recognition that culminated in the passing of the 2018 Act are at risk of being reversed based on stereotypical and harmful views and insidious misinformation campaigns. These sensationalist claims, and the false conflation of a person’s real or perceived gender identity with sexual orientation makes transgender persons even more vulnerable to abuse by law enforcement, harassment, arbitrary arrest, and prosecution.

On May 19, 2023, the Federal Shariat Court of Islamabad (FSC) announced its verdict on 12 Shairat petitions through which several petitioners challenged various sections of the Act. It ruled that sections 2(f), 3 and 7 of the Transgender Act 2018, which relate to gender identity, the right to self-perceived gender identity and the right of inheritance for transgender people do not conform with their interpretation of Islamic principles. The entire khawaja sira community is mourning the FSC’s attempt to delegitimise the Act — which is already resulting in more violence and hatred towards their community.

The petitioner’s ‘concerns’

It is unfortunate that the colonial legacy of ‘Hijra panics’ continues in South Asia to this day. Many of the concerns or panics expressed by petitioners and opponents of the Act echo right-wing Western anti-trans narratives in Pakistan and this is only a growing trend.

Fundamentally, the petitions expressed concern over the anglicised words ‘transgender’ and ‘intersex’, and the right to self perceived identity. The concerns extend to hypothetical scenarios that may result if ‘people begin changing their gender identity at will’.

Kamran Murtaza, a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of Pakistan appeared on behalf of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Pakistan to present their arguments. He stated: “Any biological male person can get access to all the places which are secluded specifically for female genders, like girls educational institutions, schools and universities etc., girls’ hostels, hospitals and other places, where services are provided to women only. Similarly, the services and jobs, which are specially and specifically allocated to females can easily be misused by biologically male persons having a CNIC of ‘X’ gender mark issued by Nadra identifying him as a ‘transgender woman’ under this law, because by doing so, that biological male person cannot be stopped [from] avail[ing] any facility or privilege meant for women only.”

Another concern was “biological men/boys” competing with girls/women in the same categories and “outperforming them in every sport”. This discourse is prevalent in the west, and is barely a concern in our local context.

Khwaja siras are not asking for access to spaces where only women or only men are allowed — they are asking for their own third spaces, an X on their ID card. While the 2018 Act was written on the basis of research, evidence, and lived experience — the concerns that motivate the FSC ruling are not.

Doctors and professors from the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association also stated that “now some new terms like ‘other-kin’ and ‘trans-species’ are also being introduced which are more disturbing than the term transgender. If any society accepts the concept of transgender, as stated in the impugned law, then there will be nothing to stop the sexual perversions and sexual degeneracies spreading in the society.” It is to be noted that no such terms have been used in the Transgender Act — such concerns are speculative projections of fear that are not grounded in the lived realities of khwaja siras in Pakistan.

During the delivery of the verdict, the court speculated that the Act could lead to rape, and sexual assault of women as petitioners alleged that it makes it easy for a man to gain access to “exclusive spaces” intended for women, “disguised” as a transgender woman.

Interestingly, the petition that raised this concern cited four instances of sexual violence by transgender women against cis-gendered women and minors. All four cases were from the United Kingdom. There is no publicly available evidence of such incidents taking place in Pakistan. Not to mention, looking at the proportion of perpetrators from male, female and transgender would do one some good. Individual cases of violence are often disproportionately highlighted and used to spread narratives about entire communities. This is not only the case with transgender communities, but all marginalised communities across the world, including Pakistanis and Muslims.

If the FSC is concerned with the rampant violence against women that already exists in our society, scapegoating our already marginalised community will not improve the condition of women in Pakistan. Women are being raped in public parks, on motorways and in their homes. The FSC should start a separate inquiry into this fahashi if it is concerned with the violation of women in this country. Instead, the state has failed to provide women with safe women-only spaces or safe public spaces. It has also, at times, failed to condemn or convict male perpetrators of violence, even when the evidence could not be more obvious.

Moreover, khwaja siras and transgender persons are not asking for access to women-only spaces; this is a myth designed to aggravate our population against the community. We already exist in this society and have co-existed for centuries before. Denying our humanity will not make us go away, it will only make our lives harder and deny the human dignity we too have a right to.

Speculative and panics of a disproportionate level were stark in many of the petitioner’s statements, as was also expressed by Amnesty International: “This ease of changing the identity will pose a threat even to the national security in certain cases … This “facility” will provide the criminals, terrorists, spies and refugees a camouflage to hide their identity, which may create a serious problem in anti-terrorist activities in the country.”

A big price to pay

A major concern was also the issue of inheritance. According to them, a biological woman can change her gender identity to a man if the Act is implemented and gain access to a man’s share in inheritance (as set per Islamic law). Ironically, they fail to recognise that the opposite would result in a trans woman losing share in inheritance. Furthermore, they fail to recognise the discrimination faced by the community, for which an added share in inheritance would be a far-from-substantial reward.

In response to the Act being misused, Advocate Farhat Ullah Babar pointed out, “A law is liable to be misused particularly if it [offers] special incentives to persons addressed in the law. The Transgender Protection Act 2018 confers no special privileges on transgender like reserved seats in parliament, in professional colleges etc. The 2018 Act only gives the transgender persons basic human rights available to every citizen including the right to vote, to contest elections, to seek education etc…

“Secondly, is it conceivable that anyone will willingly want to be recognised as a member of the most dispossessed, the most vulnerable community whose members are threatened, intimidated, ridiculed and harmed on a daily basis?”
Precedents from the (Islamic) world

Specifically, Section 2(n)(iii) of the Act has been rejected by the FSC based on their own interpretations of how gender works — the court insists that gender must conform to biological sex. Ansar Javaid, petitioner and chairman of the Birth Defects Foundation called gender dysphoria a “curable disease”.


Section 2(n) of the Transgender Protection Act 2018


This claim flouts the reality now accepted by medical and legal communities within and outside Islam, that sometimes it simply does not. How can we progress as a nation when we do not accept the lived realities of our own citizens?

International medical and legal guidelines call for accommodating sexual differences as essential to establishing ethical standards regarding the treatment of the human body. Muslim-majority countries started to allow for the change of legal gender, with the case of the Turkish Civil Code in 1988. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gave approval for sex reassignment surgeries in 1964 and again in 1985. Sex reassignment surgeries have been conducted in Morocco since 1956 and the first one occurred in Egypt in 1982. Even our own laws set a better precedent than this, such as the 2011 Supreme Court decision to grant voting rights to khwaja siras which was won by an attorney specialising in Islamic law.

In 2019, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that “gender incongruence” or gender dysphoria will no longer be considered a behavioural or mental disorder. “It was taken out of the mental health disorder because we had a better understanding that this was not actually a mental health condition and leaving it there was causing stigma,” said Dr Say, a WHO reproductive health expert.

Myth vs fact

As mentioned earlier, misinformation and conflation with western politics has led to a misunderstanding of the Act itself. Any claims that this law pursues an agenda of legalising homosexual relationships are false. The Act does not refer to sexual orientation or sexual relations at all. The preliminary objections to the petitions clearly state: “The entire text of Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 does not use any phrase or expression which may make reference to lesbians & gays or any other person who commits homosexual acts.”

Below are two more examples of some of the myths that are being spread by bad faith actors:

Myth: Someone may perceive themselves F (Female) or M (Male) contrary to the sex assigned to them at birth and get their legal gender changed to the opposite.

Fact: The transgender persons do not demand recognition as F (female) or M (Males). They only want to be legally recognised as X (transgender) for the purpose of accessing basic rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Myth: People in married couples will declare themselves the same gender as their spouse, or people of the same sex will get their legal gender changed to marry.

Fact: “This would automatically annul the marriage because the marriage can be registered in Nikahnama only between M (Male) & F (Female). There is no provision in any law and any rule for the registration of marriage between a X (Transgender) & M (Male), or between X (Transgender) and & F (Female) or between X and X,” Advocate Farhat Ullah Babar explained.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups have directed that removing the section in concern from the Transgender Act would reverse essential protections and must not be accepted.

The Government of Pakistan must not forget that it is its duty to uphold and protect the rights of all people, regardless of their real or perceived gender identity or gender expression. Its failure to do so will result in them being in violation of their obligations in respect to local legislation as well as international human rights law. Moreover, rights groups have also said that the government must stop any attempt at amending the Act that would prevent transgender persons from obtaining official documents that reflect their gender identity without complying with abusive and invasive requirements like medical examinations.

The FSC’s decision on the Transgender Rights Act will not take legal effect immediately. The Constitution clearly states that this court’s decision on the repugnancy of any law to the injunctions of Islam, will have no legal effect until the time period specified for an appeal has elapsed. The federal and provincial governments have six months to lodge an appeal. Until that time has passed, the court’s decision should not be deemed to revoke the khawaja sira community’s existing rights under the Act.


The author is a researcher, author and human rights activist. She has served as a member of the Transgender Task Force, a special committee formed for the review of the Transgender Rights Act, and has also served as a member of the former Chief Justice Special Committee on the status of Transgender CNIC registration.

She contributed to the Transgender rights welfare policy in Punjab and founded the first school for the transgender community in Okara. In 2018, she contested in the general elections from NA-142 Okara.

In recognition of her work, she has been awarded the Franco German Human Rights Prize 2020, APCOM HER

Venice Exhibition Shines Light On Africa's Forced Urbanisation

By Gildas LE ROUX

AFP

May 26, 2023

From nomads to deforestation, this year's Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on Africa and the impact of colonisation on the development of a continent undergoing the most rapid urbanisation in the world.

Away from the national pavilions, the main exhibition put together by Biennale curator Lesley Lokko shines a light on the enduring impact of the colonising Europeans who upended traditional ways of life.

Mounir Ayoub, a 40-year-old Tunisian architect based in Geneva, has long been interested in the phenomenon in Tunisia of forced settlement.

Before being colonised by France in 1881, the North African country of his birth "was mostly a country with a nomadic population -- 600,000 nomads and 400,000 sedentary (settled) people", he told AFP.

But through his collection of photos, documents and video testimony from the few remaining nomad families, he argues that France initiated a policy that eventually left the Tunisian desert depopulated.

"The desert was not empty, it was a rich ecosystem with a huge culture. The desert was populated, it was a place of immense civilisation," he told AFP at the exhibition at Venice's former shipyards.

But "France created new cities with oases where water was extracted deep in the desert in order to settle the nomads, to control them, in fact, to start setting up borders", said Ayoub.

The policy continued even after Tunisian independence in 1956, he said, with Tunisian nomads definitively settled by the 1970s and 1980s.

Pointing to places on a map that he said once teemed with life, he lamented that "now there is almost nothing left... even though the whole of Arab civilisation comes from the desert and nomadism".

The end of nomadism was a cultural loss but also an environmental one, as the travelling families had "a minimal impact on the environment", said Ayoub.

The exhibit includes a nomadic tent -- "organic architecture in the first sense of the word: goats, sheep and camels provide hair that is woven into tents".

The number of cities in Africa has doubled since 1990, with their combined population increasing by 500 million people, according to the African Development Bank.

But urban and economic growth has been not only at the expense of Africa's vast deserts but also the continent's forests.

Sammy Baloji, a photographic artist from Lubumbashi, a city in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo, charted the depletion of his country's rainforests in his project for the exhibition.

He says the process began with Belgium's rule over his country, as part of a colony also including Rwanda and Burundi, when traditional methods of cultivation were abandoned in favour of intensive agriculture.

Baloji said his project, "Debris of History, Issues of Memory", examines "all this human activity from which global warming stems, through the colonisation and devastation of this original vegetation".

The basin of the Congo River is a huge rainforest, second in size only to the Amazon, that absorbs more carbon than it releases -- an environmental benefit threatened by deforestation.

"The question is not to return Africa to its pure state," said Baloji.

"What is interesting is to observe what has been done so far: has it been done taking into account the local populations, their knowledge? Or has it been a devastation of that system to impose another system?"


The exhibition is the brainchild of Lokko, a Ghanaian-Scottish architect who curated this year's Biennale.

She invited 89 participants to contribute to "The Laboratory of the Future", with more than half of them from Africa or the African diaspora.


"We're looking at the more painful aspects of the past, and using that trauma and that vulnerability around questions of identity, migration... which are generally questions architects don't deal with, to inform new visons of the future," Lokko told AFP.

"Our relationship to the environment is a cultural relationship, it's not only a scientific or transactional relationship."

The job of every architect, she said, is "to look at the past in order to project an idea about the future".

glr/ams/ar/dl/leg

In Venice, a Chorus of Voices From Africa

More than half of the participants at the Architecture Biennale’s main exhibition are from the continent and its diaspora.

Serge Attukwei Clottey, an artist in Ghana, has stitched together pieces of yellow gallon oil containers — commonly used in Africa to store and transport water — for his piece “Time and Chance.”

Credit...Marco Zorzanello, via La Biennale di Venezia


By Sam Lubell

The New York Times
 May 21, 2023

The Venice Architecture Biennale is historically where designers from around the world critique and propose new directions for our built environment. But until now, the presence of African practitioners has been the exception, not the rule.

That has changed profoundly. Of the 89 participants in the 2023 Biennale’s main exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future,” on view at multiple locations through Nov. 26, more than half are from Africa or the African Diaspora. Half are female, and the average age — fitting for a continent with the youngest median population in the world — is 43.

This radical reapportionment was a priority of the exhibition’s Ghanaian-Scottish curator, Lesley Lokko. Her goal, she has written, was to depart from a “singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swaths of humanity.”

Lesley Lokko said her goal was to depart from a “singular, exclusive voice, whose reach and power ignores huge swathes of humanity.” Of the 89 participants in the 2023 Biennale’s main exhibition, more than half are from Africa or the African Diaspora.

Credit...Matteo de Mayda for The New York Times

Ms. Lokko’s critical mass of African talent — which includes established architects like the Burkina Faso-born Francis Kéré, the first African to win the Pritzker Prize, but also a large number of emerging practitioners and artists — sheds light on the complexity and richness of ideas emanating from that continent, the fastest-growing by population in the world, and, to many, a marker of where architecture and development are heading.

“In the Global South, we have great minds, we have great ideas. We compete at the same level. But nobody has listened or bothered to hear from an African perspective. Or it’s been an African perspective with a Western influence,” said Stella Mutegi, a co-founder, with Kabage Karanja, of Cave_bureau, a nine-year-old architecture firm in Nairobi, Kenya.

Cave_bureau’s involvement, like that of other participants, expands the definition of architecture well beyond traditional notions of building. It is about digging deeply and imaginatively into new places and cultures to unearth critiques and prescriptions for the future.

The studio’s installation, which celebrates local traditions of song, dance and poetry, presents conversations with members of several African cave-dwelling communities, like some Maasai who live in caves in Mount Suswa, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. The oral histories are combined with drawings, maps, photos, three-dimensional scans and natural sounds, an immersive experience that illuminates the impact of modernity. The presentation also illustrates the resilience of those who have long managed to live in harmony with the natural world.

Cave_bureau’s “Oral Archive (New Age Africana).” Oral histories are combined with drawings, maps, photos, three-dimensional scans and natural sounds, an immersive experience that illuminates the impact of modernity.

Credit...Matteo de Mayda, via La Biennale di Venezia

“For us to look ahead, we really need to go back,” Mr. Karanja said, proposing a return to “a real, honest state” as a solution to the environmental and social damages inflicted by modern life. “It might sound romantic,” he added, “but we’re really trying to grapple with this kind of crisis.”

Ms. Lokko, who is a respected architectural teacher and critic, but also a best-selling novelist, has helped mentor many of the participants. “The Laboratory of the Future” emphasizes the role of story telling in the creation of architecture, challenging what the discipline is, what it needs to be and how it can transform society through creativity and inclusivity, not violence or disruption.

“The more we can fan out a greater collective of people to get their views on how the world can be, and to think imaginatively, the better,” said Zenna Tavares, a founder, with his brothers, Gaika and Kibwe Tavares, of a creative collaboration called Basis with GKZ. Loosely inspired by traditional West African storytellers, known as jalis, their installation, “Djali,” displays short stories within an imaginary, computer-augmented world set in the future. Viewers can interact with the display, navigating through scenes and exploring different artificial-intelligence and augmented-reality-enhanced stories and settings.

“It’s a tool for exploring how this technology can affect us and define us,” Kibwe Tavares said. “Any time there’s been a shift in technology, you see a shift in how people create buildings. How people draw. How people see and experience the world. How will the world unfold when we’re not the only voice?”

The global impact of young architects of African descent is another theme. The Tavares brothers grew up in South London to parents from Jamaica and Grenada who considered themselves Pan-Africanists. “We were always encouraged to think of ourselves as being from the African Diaspora,” Gaika Tavares said.

Sumayya Vally, the founder of the architecture firm Counterspace, was born in South Africa to Muslim parents from India and lives in London and Johannesburg. Her collaborator, Moad Musbahi, grew up in Libya and Tunisia and is an artist and a graduate student at Princeton University, in New Jersey. Their entry, “African Post Office,” presents literal columns — totems, minarets, instruments, posts embedded with audio speakers — of identical diameters, accompanied by sounds like prayer chants and bird calls recorded around the world.

This play of commonality and difference, Ms. Vally said, shifts and expands how we think about geography, culture and identity. “My own identity involves so many territories and conditions — eastern and western; northern, southern and subcontinental; Islamic and Arabian,” she said. Such crosscurrents are bound to be fruitful in generating ideas about architecture. “I think there’s much more power in being hybrid because we’re able to cross territories,” she said.

Thandi Loewenson, “The Uhuru Catalogues.” The graphite drawings are inspired by the Uhuru catalog, X-ray images captured by a satellite launched by the United States and Italy from a platform off the coast of Kenya.

Credit...Matteo de Mayda, via La Biennale di Venezia

The inspirations for projects are equally boundary crossing. Thandi Loewenson, who was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, and lives in London, presents graphite drawings inspired by the Uhuru catalog, X-ray images captured by a little-known satellite launched by the United States and Italy from a platform off the coast of Kenya. The planning for it started shortly before Kenya’s independence in 1963.

Dr. Loewenson explores this obscure episode’s relevance to colonialism, resource extraction, broken promises and much more. “There is a duality within the work about looking out and into the universe but also looking into the earth at the same time,” she said.

Serge Attukwei Clottey, an artist in Accra, Ghana, has stitched together pieces of yellow gallon oil containers — commonly used in Africa to store and transport water — to form a surface undulating from the columns of the 16th-century Gaggiandre shipyards. In and around Accra, Mr. Clottey is collaborating with young architects to upcycle discarded materials into new designs, from chairs to houses. “This is what Africa is now,” Mr. Clottey. said. “It’s about using our own ideas, our own resources, to reshape our own country.”

MASS’s “Afritect.” In this work, members of MASS’s Africa studio discuss the meaning of various words from Rwanda’s national language.

Credit...Matteo de Mayda, via La Biennale di Venezia

Christian Benimana, a senior principal at MASS, an architecture firm with offices in the United States and his native Rwanda, centered the studio’s contribution, “Afritect,” on the perspective-shifting nuances of language. In this work, members of MASS’s Africa studio discuss the meaning of various words from Rwanda’s national language, Ikinyarwanda. “Umuganda” roughly translates to “collective action toward a shared goal”; “ubudehe” is a social activity that brings neighbors together; and “ubupfura” represents the highest level of human character.

“Through tradition and meaning, you are able to capture and understand the spirit or essence of my people,” said Symphorien Gasana, a MASS designer in Rwanda. Added Mr. Benimana: “The full story is what we know plus all these other collective viewpoints and perspectives of many people, many cultures.”

Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood, partners at the New York architecture firm AD–WO, introduce the concept of a ghebbi, a loosely defined zone of respite, which can be a home, a school or an entire city. How does this protected world engage with outer chaos — the push and pull of modernity and tradition, security and exchange? An answer dangles from the ceiling of the Arsenale exhibition site — an installation made from corrugated metal sheets, bamboo scaffolding, tarpaulin, and rope, suggestive of madcap construction in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, where Mr. Admassu was born. At the center of the construction are intricate, monumental tapestries that evoke ghebbis.

AD-WO’s “Ghebbi.” At the center of the construction are intricate, monumental tapestries that evoke ghebbis, a loosely defined zone of respite, which can be a home, a school or an entire city.

Credit...Marco Zorzanello, via La Biennale di Venezia

“I think this Biennale is finally heading in a direction accounting for multiple worlds and multiple ways of understanding value and space making,” Mr. Admassu said. He sees lessons for the wider world, especially now: “We need to double down on the various forms of solidarity, instead of closing further in or retreating.”

Mariam Kamara, a French-born Nigerien architect and founder of Atelier Masomi, lives between New York, Zurich and Niamey, Niger, where her studio is based. Her installation includes massive charcoal representations of a 17th-century Hausa Kingdom mosque, one of many built treasures that inspire pride in her African homeland. “You’re taught architecture by looking at a handful of references, most of them from Europe, which is so limited,” she said.

Today, ideas are among the continent’s natural resources, flourishing out of its challenged economies, she said. The creativity that is born of necessity “has incredible value as we’re grappling with challenges like climate change, seismic economic events, fractured politics,” she said. “We have been a laboratory in every field. I’m very excited we get to share with the rest of the world.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 22, 2023, Section A, Page 10 in The New York Times International Edition.

EU and farmers at odds over law to stop ecosystem collapse

To slow down climate change, the EU wants to reduce agricultural emissions and promote sustainable soil use. 

A new law would see the restoration of CO2-storing peatlands, but critics fear farmers will lose out

Tim Schauenberg

DW
24 hours ago

Farmers and conservative lawmakers in the European Union are up in arms over landmark nature legislation meant to bolster the bloc's green transition and prevent vital ecosystems and species from being wiped out due to climate change.

The Nature Restoration Law, first introduced by the European Commission in June 2022, has met political resistance over plans to restore drained peatlands. If passed, the bill would allow for 30% of all former peatlands currently exploited for agriculture to be restored and partially shifted to other use by the end of the decade, a figure rising to 70% by 2050.

Farmers, many of whom cultivate monocultures like grain and corn (seen here), are worried about what peatland restoration means for their industry

: Jochen Tack/picture-alliance

But farmers' associations say they fear the widespread loss of valuable agricultural land. Supporters, meanwhile, see the new rules as crucial to meeting the EU's climate goals because peatlands help slow planetary heating.

Peatlands absorb more carbon than forests

Peatland, which is a type of wetland, forms over thousands of years from the remains of dead plants, storing more carbon than any other ecosystem.

Globally, peatlands take up some 3% of the planet's land area — and yet, they absorb nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as all the Earth's forests combined. But when damp peatlands are drained and used for other purposes, like agriculture or fertilizer, they go from being a CO2 sink to yet another potent source of greenhouse gas.

Across Europe, 7% of the continent's greenhouse gas emissions are the result of drained peatlands and wetlands. That's nearly as much CO2 as the emissions produced by the EU's entire industrial output.

More than half of Europe's peatlands lost

European peatlands, full of nutrients and especially important for biodiversity, make up a patch of land roughly the size of Germany. More than half have suffered permanent damage. In Germany, the amount of degraded peatlands is estimated to be as high as 90%.

Former peatlands in Scandinavia and the Baltic states are mainly used for forestry. But in the Netherlands, Poland and Germany, large swathes of these drained areas are now farmland. Former peatlands account for about 7% of Germany's agricultural land, and now generate 37% of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

Sophie Hirschelmann, an expert at the Greifswald Mire Centre, a research institute in northeastern Germany, said that when it comes to agriculture the continent needs a "paradigm shift" to meet the Paris climate goals. This means moving away from farming on drained peatlands and investing in paludiculture — agriculture on rewetted peat soil. The latter would stop carbon emissions while improving soil and water quality.

In the EU's proposed legislation, rewetting has been planned for half the former peatlands across Europe. For the other half, less effective measures would be used.

In Germany, a comparatively large amount of agricultural activity takes place on peat soils. For Hirschelmann, that means the proposed rewetting and conversion of agricultural land to paludiculture is "very comparable, in scope, to phasing out coal."

"We need policies designed to transform the use of these peatlands," she said.
Political pressure to water down green proposals

The European People's Party (EPP), the conservative group in the European Parliament, is seeking to drastically reduce the scope of these plans for wetland restoration. It is also against the conversion of agricultural land for other uses.

A recent claim that it "doesn't make sense to tear down villages built 100 years ago to create wetlands," boosted by the EPP and other groups on Twitter, caused an uproar.

In response to a question by DW as to exactly which villages this tweet was referring to, the EEP press office replied that it could not say whether any villages or infrastructure were actually in danger of being cleared. Jutta Paulus, a German Member of the European Parliament for the Green Party, called the dissemination of such misinformation "absurd" and "populist."

European farming group Copa-Cogeca, on the other hand, has warned of the economic and social fallout of the EU's green proposal. Rewetting, it says, could lead to a widespread drop in the productivity of large areas of agricultural land and even endanger food security.

Supporters of the law have pointed out that the new legislation would actually ensure Europe's long-term food security. In early May, Virginijus Sinkevicius, EU Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, tweeted that "despite the myths, the benefits for farmers are many: fertile soils, less impacts from droughts, water retention, pollination."

"[Farmers] will always be able to make a greater short-term profit from a drained peatland planted with a cash crop, than if it's managed in its rewetted form," said Green MEP Paulus. "And that's why, of course, they will need to be compensated."

 
Profitable agriculture, green solutions can coexist

Backers of the ambitious legislation have pointed out that profitable agriculture and the restoration of wetlands need not be at odds with each other.

The European Commission has calculated that every euro invested in restoring natural resources would result in at least eight times the economic return over the long term.

And while rewetted land wouldn't be able to support monocultures like grains or corn, it could support the growth of other crops, according to a position paper released in January by several scientific institutions and environmental organizations, including the Greifswald Mire Centre.

Rehabilitated land could also be used to grow timber, or plant grasses and reeds that could serve as insulation material for the construction sector or as raw material for organic plastic substitutes. And instead of cows, revitalized areas could one day become grazing grounds for water buffalo.

Water buffalo, who feel at home on swampy soils, could replace cattle on restored peatlands

 Roland Weihrauch/dpa/picture alliance

The one thing that is clear, however, is that land use must change over the long term, said Hirschelmann.

"At the moment, we still have the chicken-and-egg problem," she said. Many of these new products are ready for the market, but farmers are still waiting for long-term production commitments. Customers don't know enough about these products to give farmers those commitments.

In the coming weeks, the European Parliament plans to agree on a common position and negotiate a final version of the legislation with representatives from the 27 EU member states. The goal is to get the bill passed before the European elections next year.

That could be a challenge. On May 22, the bloc's green policy chief, Frans Timmermans, told lawmakers who have called for the plan to be scrapped that the Commission would not redraft the bill.

"We will not come up with another proposal. There simply isn't time," he said at a European Parliament committee meeting. Rejecting the proposal would put the EU's overall green agenda at risk, he added.

"As an interconnected package of solutions, if one piece falls, the other pieces fall," said Timmermans.

GUNS OR BUTTER

Germany: Are falling butter prices a sign inflation is over?

German consumers are looking less concerned when shopping for groceries these days, as prices for food have begun falling slowly. But is peak inflation behind them?

Dirk Kaufmann
DW

Germans spend less of their income on food than most Europeans. Even the market distortions caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine haven't been able to fundamentally change this.

Poorer Germans, who spend a sizable chunk of their available income on food, have always had to pinch and scrape at the supermarket checkout. But in recent months, even the country's better-off couldn't help but cringe at the price of a 400-gram tub of their cherished Irish butter, which jumped to €4.99 ($5.38) at the height of inflation earlier this year.

For a few weeks now, however, German food prices have been falling again and butter from Ireland has dropped back down to €4.29 — almost what it cost before the pandemic. Homegrown German butter is considerably cheaper, with discount supermarket own brands priced at €1.59 for 250 grams.
Patience and confidence required

The German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) has also registered a turnaround in inflation in Germany: "We have probably reached the peak of inflation. The trend reversal has begun," researcher Kerstin Bernoth told the joint corporate newsroom of Germany's Madsack Media Group recently.

But people should not expect prices to fall everywhere, she added: "All it means is that prices will not continue to rise. We have to get used to the current prices." What's needed now is patience, Bernoth said, urging consumers to "trust that prices will settle back lower in the long run."

Cheese and pasta prices have come down from unprecedented peaks

Sven Hoppe/dpa/picture alliance

'Prices more likely to rise'

Kai Hudetz, managing director of the Institute for Retail Research in Cologne (IFH), sounded less euphoric. He cited the reasons for the price increases, which remain relevant.

"Skyrocketing energy, logistics and raw material costs have triggered a chain reaction," he told DW. "All companies along the value chain have had and continue to have to contend with rising costs."

Hudetz noted, however, that many additional costs have already been passed on to consumers, which is why "inflation rates are currently lower and at least selective price reductions are possible."

The IFH director is far from declaring an "end to inflation", after all, prices are still rising in more product categories than they are falling. "Some manufacturers have announced price increases, which retailers will have pass on in view of their low margins. Comparatively high wage settlements are also flowing into prices, encouraging the tendency to rise."

Trade unions have only just begun demanding higher wages, meaning a wage-price spiral may fuel inflation even further

Image: Wolfgang Kumm/dpa/picture alliance

Discount power

One reason for comparatively low food prices in Germany is fierce competition between some of the biggest retailers in Europe. Brands such as Rewe, Edeka, Aldi and Lidl fight for market share and their purchasing power enables them to keep supplier prices down.

In the era of inflation, discount retailers such as Lidl have been able to boost their market share, as rising living costs have led more customers to shun the higher-priced offerings of conventional grocery chains. But with prices rising everywhere in Germany, even tough negotiators like Lidl Germany CEO Christian Härtnagel are finding it difficult to drive a hard bargain.

"We know the development in the raw material markets. We know approximately how much personnel and energy costs go into the individual products. And we do everything we can to achieve negotiating success so that we can pass on the best possible price to customers," he told German news agency dpa recently.

Nevertheless, he said, current price wars being waged against suppliers such as Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Unilever and others could even lead to some product ranges being removed from supermarket shelves.

Lidl says it accepts food companies passing on their cost increases for energy and materials, but only if they are "reasonable"

picture-alliance/W. Steinberg

No quick turnaround

According to Härtnagel, the German discounter would be negotiating "intensively" to keep price hikes "within limits", thereby defending its customers against "unreasonable" demands.

Lidl wants to "react quickly" when food markets ease, said Härtnagel, referring to past reductions relating to the price of butter, pasta, or cheese. But he dampened hopes for a rapid and comprehensive price turnaround.

IFH Managing Director Kai Hudetz confirmed that currently prices "are only falling in isolated cases, and that too only slightly." What German consumers are seeing are "mainly promotional prices" and reductions in vegetables and fruit "due to seasonal factors."

The golden days are over

Market analysts believe a return to pre-pandemic food price levels will be a long time coming, if at all. The market power of Germany's Big Four discount retailers might ensure that purchase prices rise less significantly than in other European countries, but even these low-cost champions cannot avoid higher prices, both within their own companies and on the part of their suppliers.

Inflation is here to stay, says Kai Hudetz. He is convinced that prices won't fall back to pre-pandemic levels. "We will have to get used to higher food prices, at least in the short and medium term."

This article was originally published in German.

Pakistan: Poor suffer as cash crunch hits charity projects

With Pakistan's economic turmoil worsening, those in poverty are suffering most. The country is in the midst of a serious financial crisis caused by a long delay in the $1.1 billion bailout from the IMF.

Jamila Achakzai in Islamabad

DW

With Pakistan in dire straits due to loan delays by international financial institutions, its charity sector is particularly hard hit by cash shortages.

Ghazi Khan has resumed sleeping on the street as authorities have closed down shelters in Quetta, the capital city of the southwestern Balochistan province.

Until recently, the 61-year-old manual worker, whose wife, only son and grandchildren live away in his native Mastung area, used to spend nights at the Spinny Road Panahgah (shelter home) and eat at the adjacent Langar Khana (soup kitchen).

However, that is no longer the case.

"I work at the vegetable market to load goods onto trucks and earn paltry sums daily, so [renting a] room is out of the question. [Former Prime Minister Imran] Khan gave homeless people like me the roof [Panahgahs] to sleep under at night but the current government snatched it from us and therefore, we all are back in the open to nap and sleep," he told DW.

The Panahgah closures in the city also forced Parveen Bibi, a 55-year-old Afghan widow, onto the street again.

She said she used to spend the night in the Saryab Road Panahgah but now slept either at the main bus terminal or at the nearby railway station, and depended on cash handouts for survival.

Projects, jobs at risk

Currently, Pakistan is embroiled in a serious financial crisis caused by a long delay in the $1.1 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Other major lenders of the world, too, have promised loans but linked their release with the signing of the IMF deal, which, to many, is not in sight.

The local industry has suffered badly from the rupee's massive devaluation and import hurdles, while 36.6% inflation, the highest in the country's history, has caused a squeeze on people's income.

Both public and private sector organizations complain they don't have enough to cover expenses, a threat to the ongoing projects as well as the jobs of staff members.
Government under fire from opposition

Former prime minister Imran Khan's administration put up Panahgahs and Langar Khanas across the country with the help of private hunger relief organizations.

However, those in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan provinces were closed down lately with the semi-autonomous Pakistan Baitul Mal (PBM), which oversees the initiative, citing the unavailability of funds as the reason. All workers except guards were also laid off.

Shelter homes like this one in Quetta have been closed

PPI/ZUMA Wire/picture alliance

Sania Nishtar from the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) party and former PM Khan's aide on poverty alleviation claimed that 80% of shelter homes and soup kitchens had wounded up operations in provinces other than KP and Balochistan, while the rest had reduced their activities to almost zero.

Khan, too, blasted his successor Shehbaz Sharif over the closure of shelter homes and promised to reopen them if or when he returns to power.

In a tweet a day before May 1 International Workers Day, Kahn said: "I felt humbled when I visited a Panahgah - laborers being served a meal with dignity & sleeping in warm beds rather than on footpaths in bitter cold. In inhumane acts, govt has now closed most Panahgahs & targeted health card scheme too. We [PTI] will reopen Panahgahs immed[iately] on being reelected."



Social welfare suffers

Experts warn the continued economic crisis means more cutbacks in charitable programs.

"Private societal actions of philanthropy and charities are here to stay. However, such government and public-funded initiatives may suffer due to fiscal constraints. The government needs to focus on insulating allocation for the social safety nets amidst this crisis," development economist and head of the Islamabad-based think tank Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) Dr. Abid Suleri told DW.

He also insisted that though the closure of Panahgahs and Langar Khanas was unfortunate as it would add to the misery of the poor, many of those public-funded initiatives were not very sustainable to begin with.

The cash crunch has led the PBM into delaying the funding of patient care, suspending the delivery of food to poor neighborhoods in Islamabad and the adjoining city of Rawalpindi while — affecting women's vocational training program.

PBM managing director Amir Fida Paracha told DW that his organization had asked the government for the provision of additional grants on a priority basis to keep its welfare projects going but at the same time, it was minimizing its administrative expenditure to divert funds to projects of public welfare.

He also said that a national campaign to raise funds was in the works amid hopes that it would help address the PBM's financial woes, while philanthropists were being encouraged to help provide assistive products to people with disabilities.

Collections decline

Private charities Edhi Foundation and Chhippa Welfare Association insist that the demand for their ambulance service, a major source of their income, has taken a major hit.

Muhammad Shahid of the Chhipa Welfare Association in Karachi told DW that the inflation-induced income squeeze had forced people to use cheaper transportation modes compared with ambulances.

"Now, the cost of living has gone up so high that people have ambulance affordability issues. They prefer taking patients to hospitals on ride-hailing motorbikes or public transport vehicles as this commuting mode is not as heavy on their pockets as our ambulance service is," he said.

The charity worker also claimed an almost 50% drop in the collection of Zakat (mandatory handouts given away by Muslims to the poor and the deserving) by his organization and blamed it on people's reduced purchasing power due to the record inflation rate.

The Edhi Foundation that claims to have over 1,800 ambulances, the largest fleet in the world, has seen a decline in ambulance use by patients, according to its staff member, Zeeshan Ahmad, in the city of Quetta.

He also told DW that his charity organization also collected 230 million rupees ($2.78 million, €2.59 million) Zakat in the last month of fasting compared with the previous Ramadan's 300 million rupees.

EU: Twitter leaves voluntary pact on fighting disinformation

The social media giant, owned by Elon Musk, has been warned that "obligations remain" over the removal of fake news. Twitter and other large platforms will face heavier regulation when new EU rules take effect in August.

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Twitter has withdrawn from a voluntary European Union agreement to stamp out disinformation online, a top EU official said late Friday.

"Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain," EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote on Twitter.

"You can run but you can't hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement," Breton added, referring to the EU's new Digital Services Act which takes effect in less than two months.

Twitter has yet to confirm its withdrawal from the code, but the decision appears to be the latest move by billionaire owner Elon Musk to loosen the reins after he bought the social media firm last year.

Musk cut thousands of jobs to save money, slashing entire departments, including those responsible for content moderation.

Pursuing a goal of turning Twitter into a digital town square, where freedom of speech is prioritized, Musk has rolled back previous anti-misinformation rules, and has thrown its verification system into chaos.

Light-touch moderation

The platform now says it "deboosts" and demonetizes extremely negative or hateful tweets so they can only be seen if a user searches for them, while posts that contain fake news are moderated to include corrections, often from the Twitter community.

The current EU Code of Practice of Disinformation includes obligations to track political advertising, stop the monetization of disinformation, and to work with fact-checkers.

Twitter signed the code in 2018, along with other social media platforms including TikTok, Facebook owner Meta and Google.

The platforms are meant to issue regular reports on their progress in combating disinformation.

In February, Brussels published reports on how online platforms were implementing the code and noted that Twitter gave no "specific information and no no targeted data" related to transparency commitments.

Tougher EU rules from August

Under the new Digital Services Act, tech companies will have to moderate their platforms for harmful content like disinformation and introduce protocols to block the spread of dangerous material.

Companies must also increase transparency regarding interactions with users and simplify user agreements.

Twitter, among others, has been designated as a so-called Very Large Online Platform (VLOP), which means it will be monitored more strictly by Brussels than smaller platforms.

Twitter currently boasts nearly 330 million monthly active users, with more than half coming from the United States, Japan and India.

Only one European country, the United Kingdom, makes Twitter's Top 10 user list, but the UK is no longer an EU member.

Twitter says it has between 7 and 9 million users each in France, Spain and Germany, its three biggest EU-based markets.

mm/fb (AP, dpa)

Does marijuana cause depression in teenagers?

Increasing evidence is linking cannabis use in teens with depression, but whether one causes the other is still unclear.

Esteban Pardo

DW
May 24, 2023

The global attitude towards cannabis has been changing, drifting more towards exploring its potential medicinal uses and legalizing it.

Eight countries, including Canada, Uruguay, Mexico and Thailand, and 22 states in the US have legalized recreational marijuana, and around 50 countries have legalized it for medicinal use. Many other countries are currently pushing their laws in that direction.

But just like with tobacco and alcohol, legalization doesn’t mean the drug is not harmful.

Marijuana is also one of the most used substances among teenagers around the world. In the US, more 2.5 million teens casually use cannabis, according to researchers from Columbia University in New York, and cannabis usage among youth has increased over the last decades.

That’s why the trend towards legalization and medicinal use has raised alarms, particularly about the potential health risks in adolescents.

A developing brain

Although it can be tricky to tell when adolescence stops, it’s clear that it is a period that comes with many biological changes, including changes in the brain.

Those changes make it even harder to understand how cannabis can affect teenagers’ minds.

During adolescence, the brain is in development up to about the mid-20s, according to the US’ National Institute of Mental Health.

During this time, there’s major development and fine-tuning in areas of the brain related to handling emotions, coping with stress, rewards and motivation, decision-making, thinking before acting, controlling impulses and reasoning, just to name a few. There’s also an increase in white matter and a decrease in gray matter during adolescence, which makes different brain regions communicate faster and more efficiently.

It’s a hard knock, life for teenagers. Not only do their bodies go through drastic changes, but they often struggle with issues like identity, social pressure, getting good grades, family dynamics and many other things.

All these changes and pressures can make teens more likely to have mental health issues, like anxiety and depression, and they can lead to their using substances like marijuana to cope, according to the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The problem is that using marijuana can also make those mental health conditions worse in the long run.

Because the brain is developing in this stage, it is also particularly vulnerable to substances like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs acting on it. These substances have been shown to change or delay some of the developments usually taking place during adolescence, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In the case of cannabis, there’s increasing evidence that it modifies the brain of teenagers.

 
The evidence regarding cannabis and depression

Marijuana usage has been linked to difficulties with thinking and solving problems, memory and learning, and with reduced coordination and concentration, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It’s still not clear if these problems persist after stopping cannabis use.

Research has also shown associations between cannabis use and mental health problems like anxiety and depression. It’s also more likely for people that use cannabis to have psychotic episodes.

 

Female cannabis flower buds have the highest content of THC, the major psychoactive component of cannabis.

A study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, earlier this month, looked into teens who occasionally used cannabis in the last 12 months. The study analyzed the responses of almost 70,000 teenagers to the 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The study found that, compared to non-users, those that did use marijuana but didn't meet the criteria for addiction reported two to four times more mental health problems like depression, suicidal thoughts, slower thinking and difficulty concentrating.

This could suggest there's an association between marijuana use and mental health issues, but it's still unclear whether one directly causes the other.

Another recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that marijuana use in teens was also associated with an increased risk of developing depression and suicidal thoughts later in life.

However, a 2022 study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology showed that teenagers that used cannabis weren’t more likely to develop mental health problems like depression or anxiety compared to adults that used cannabis. Only teenagers with cannabis addiction had worse mental health


Is cannabis the cause?

Correlation does not equal causation and as in the case of the chicken and the egg, it's hard to tell whether the use of cannabis in adolescents is the cause of the higher association with depression and other mental health issues, or whether teens with these issues are more likely to use cannabis.

A 2020 study published in Frontiers of Psychology reviewed the evidence on cannabis and the teenage brain and concluded that because of the way many of the available studies, so-called cross-sectional studies, were designed, we don’t know much about the nature of the relationship between cannabis use and mental health.

Cross-sectional studies look at different groups of people at a specific point in time. The aim is to gather information about a particular topic by collecting data from a diverse group of individuals all at once. Then researchers analyze the data and try to find patterns or relationships, but they cannot establish what causes what.

The Frontiers of Psychology study also stressed that it's possible that both cannabis use and mental health problems may be caused by something else, like teens' susceptibility to stress and anxiety mentioned earlier.

To figure out whether cannabis causes mental health issues in teenagers, more research is needed.

Edited by: Carla Bleiker

Why are Germany and South Korea sharing military secrets?

With the new intelligence-sharing pact, Berlin and Seoul aim to boost their defense capabilities amid the conflict in Ukraine and tensions in the Indo-Pacific.


Julian Ryall

DW
May 24, 2023

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stayed in South Korea for only a few hours — but his visit and talks with President Yoon Suk-yeol yielded a series of agreements, most notably the pact on sharing military intelligence and streamlining supply chains for the two nations' defense industries.

The bilateral summit took place as Scholz was returning from the G7 meeting in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Both diplomatic events focused largely on the ongoing security crisis in Ukraine and the simmering tensions in northeast Asia. And when it comes to Asia, China was once again the most important topic.

Analysts point out that the defense deals between Scholz and Yoon are just the latest examples of similar deals between various nations that, taken together, can be seen a pushback against Chinese influence.

Beijing's own actions — from unilaterally occupying and militarizing disputed islands in the South China Sea to confrontations with Japan over islands in the East China Sea and clashes with India over territory in the Himalayas — could in turn be presented as a reason for those new alliances and agreements.

And Germany has been boosting its role in the Indo-Pacific in recent years. In 2021, a German warship was deployed to the region and carried out a series of exercises with other navies, while fighter aircraft have also taken part in joint maneuvers more recently.

South Korea-NATO ties to grow even stronger

Scholz and Yoon met at the president's office in Seoul after the German leader had travelled to the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula. While on the heavily fortified border, Scholz said Pyongyang's ongoing development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles indicate there is "still a dangerous situation" on the peninsula and that the North remains "a threat to peace and security in this region."

In their subsequent talks, the two leaders agreed on a deal to share and protect military secrets and establish mechanisms to give military supply chains greater resilience.

Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, points to "expansionist policies in Beijing" as a reason for stronger cooperation between nations not allied with China.

"I fully expect to see more of the same," Pinkston told DW in reference to the closer military ties. "It is reasonable to expect South Korean forces to take part in exercises with units from NATO and other countries with shared security concerns. These exercises are critical to ensuring the interoperability of munitions, weapons systems and components and it makes absolute sense to make sure that supply chains are guaranteed."

Ukraine war 'came as a deep shock' to South Korea

And while German navy and air force take part in drills with South Korean troops, Seoul is exporting advanced weapons systems to Europe. Last year, South Korea signed a massive defense deal with Poland, estimated to be worth €15 billion, ($16.2 billion). It includes the sale nearly 1,000 K2 main battle tanks, 648 self-propelled howitzers and 48 FA050 fighter jets.

As Poland is a member of NATO, this means German troops will take part in exercises in which they will, at some point, come up against the Korean equipment. It is important that Germany is aware of its capabilities, Pinkston said.

In the Indo-Pacific region, however, South Korea will be hoping that a closer alliance with another European power will boost its deterrence to potential rivals.

"It is clear that Korea is seeking closer and greater engagement with Western nations and that can clearly be traced back to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, which came as a deep shock to this country," said Rah Jong-yil, a former diplomat and senior South Korean intelligence officer.

"In this part of the world, China is of course the big worry, but we also have to keep a close eye on North Korea and Russia," he said.

China reaches out for allies

While Seoul is looking for close allies in the West, China appears to be conducting a diplomatic offensive of its own.

"In recent months, Beijing has been reaching out to a number of states in the Middle East and Central Asia as it looks to build its own alliances, so both sides are building up their partnerships and working on improving their own interests," Rah said.

Parallel to the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Beijing set up its own summit with five Central Asian nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in the Chinese city of Xi'an. China also recently acted as a peace broker in the Middle East and is credited with Saudi Arabia and Iran stepping back from years of animosity.

China's attempt to boost its already formidable influence in Asia will not go unnoticed in Seoul.

"North Korea is right on the South's border and is the most acute and immediate military threat," said Pinkston. "But the bigger picture is that the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, human rights and global governance issues all come back to China, and that will be the challenge going forward."

Edited by: Darko Janjevic

Uyghur rights: Clothing firms under fire over forced labor

Skechers, Zara and several other fashion brands are facing a complaint filed by a group of NGOs in Paris that accuses them of profiting from crimes against the Uyghur minority in China.

Julian Ryall in Tokyo
DW
May 25, 2023

Activist groups are demanding an investigation of a number of leading international fashion brands, accusing them of being complicit in crimes against members of the Uyghur ethnic community in China.

A new complaint was filed in Paris last week by the anticorruption campaign organization Sherpa, the Ethics on Labels collective, the European Uyghur Institute and a Uyghur woman who was detained in a camp run by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang region.

The complaint names the French subsidiary of Japanese clothing giant Uniqlo and its parent company Fast Retailing, as well as Inditex, the owner of the Zara brand, French fashion house SMCP and US-based footwear manufacturer Skechers.

The complaint focuses on the alleged abuses in the Xinjiang region of China. Human rights organizations believe that over a million people, mostly Uyghur Muslims, are being held in "reeducation camps" and that many of them are forced to work against their will.

The activists say the companies are complicit in crimes against humanity, genocide, aggravated bondage and human trafficking.

Specifically, the NGOs believe that the companies do not have full control over their subcontractors, which is causing them to sell goods with components from forced-labor factories.

"Multinational companies who use cotton from the region or resort to subcontractors benefiting from Chinese government programs cannot ignore that their products could be made with Uyghur forced labor," the complaint added. "By marketing these products, the fashion industry is profiting from the serious crimes committed against this population."

The statement also said that "20% of the world's cotton production originates from the Uyghur region, so one in five cotton garments could be tainted by Uyghur forced labor."

The Chinese government has dismissed claims of forced labor and insists the camps are vocational centers designed to stop the spread of extremism.
US ban on Xinjiang products

In a statement to DW, a spokesperson for Fast Retailing in Tokyo said that the company was aware of the complaint due to media reports.

"While we have not been notified by the authorities, if and when notified, we will cooperate fully with the investigation to reaffirm there is no forced labor in our supply chains," the company said.

The same groups filed a similar complaint in April 2021. However, the public prosecutor in Paris shut it down on the grounds that it did not have the jurisdiction to prosecute this type of offense.

UN report on Uyghurs in China

Three months after the original complaint was filed, the US Senate passed a ban on importing products from Xinjiang, unless it can be proven they are free of forced labor.
HRW says China puts pressure on companies over due diligence

While Human Rights Watch is not one of the organizations behind the complaint filed in Paris, its activists are closely monitoring China's treatment of its minorities. The group also has deep concerns that components made by forced labor are finding their way into clothing sold by famous brands.

"In our view, the Chinese government's constraints are so profound that companies cannot do due diligence inspections; their inspectors cannot turn up at these sites and ascertain if workers are being treated fairly," said Sophie Richardson, director of the organization's Chinese human rights operations.

"Companies often characterize their opponents as being anti-business, but that is just not the case," she told DW. "We expect all companies to publish their human rights due diligence reports to ensure that they are not creating or contributing to human rights violations."

"If we can go through this exercise and fix the problems, then these companies can continue," she added.

The problem, however, is the lack of access in areas tightly controlled by the Chinese government. The authorities have also been putting pressure on foreign companies that do try to carry out due diligence studies, Richardson said.

Companies hesitant to anger China

Roy Larke, senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Waikoto, in New Zealand, and an expert on retailing and consumer behavior, points out that brands "have an ethical and moral obligation to uphold basic human rights."

A clothing giant such as the Japanese Uniqlo will understand the "likely commercial consequences if it were found to be failing in this obligation," he added.

Yet Uniqlo was decidedly slow in withdrawing from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, waiting until August to "suspend" operations. And that was after a previous announcement that it would remain in the Russian market was met with a strong public backlash.

"Rather than the brand's moral stance, there is, of course, the issue of just how much a brand's customers actually care, particularly when that brand is providing good quality products at a reasonable cost," said Larke.

"For Uniqlo and many other international brands, there is also the problem of dealing with criticisms of this and other supply chain issues in China when, at the same time, China is a vital market for the brand," he added.

There are presently around 925 Uniqlo stores in China compared to around 720 in Japan, and China will be a major part of the brand's push towards 5 trillion yen (€33.3 billion, $35.8 billion) in global annual sales.

"As a global player, it cannot afford to be seen to support proven human rights abuses, but equally, it cannot afford to upset the Chinese government — and, as with the majority of international brands, Uniqlo, they have the right to be considered innocent until proven otherwise," he emphasized.

Edited by: Darko Janjevic